Institutional pioneers in world politics: Regional institution building and the influence of the European Union
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066116674261 |
E
JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116674261
European Journal of
International Relations
2017, Vol. 23(3) 654 –680
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1354066116674261
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Institutional pioneers in world
politics: Regional institution
building and the influence of
the European Union
Tobias Lenz
University of Goettingen, Germany
GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany
Alexandr Burilkov
GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany
Abstract
What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations?
We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized
cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena
whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic
premise of ‘diffusion theory’ — meaning that decision-making is interdependent across
organizations — we argue that institutional pioneers, and specifically the European
Union, shape regional institution-building processes in a number of discernible ways. We
then hypothesize two pathways — active and passive — of European Union influence,
and stipulate an endogenous capacity for institutional change as a key scope condition
for their operation. Drawing on a new and original data set on the institutional design
of 34 regional international organizations in the period from 1950 to 2010, the article
finds that: (1) both the intensity of a regional international organization’s structured
interaction with the European Union (active influence) and the European Union’s own
level of delegation (passive influence) are associated with higher levels of delegation
within other regional international organizations; (2) passive European Union influence
exerts a larger overall substantive effect than active European Union influence does;
and (3) these effects are strongest among those regional international organizations that
are based on founding contracts containing open-ended commitments. These findings
indicate that the creation and subsequent institutional evolution of the European
Corresponding author:
Tobias Lenz, Department of Political Science, University of Goettingen, Platz der Goettinger Sieben 3,
37073 Goettingen, Germany.
Email: Tobias.lenz@sowi.uni-goettingen.de
674261EJT0010.1177/1354066116674261European Journal of International RelationsLenz and Burilkov
research-article2016
Article
Lenz and Burilkov 655
Union has made a difference to the evolution of institutions in regional international
organizations elsewhere, thereby suggesting that existing theories of regionalism are
insufficiently able to account for processes of institution building in such contexts.
Keywords
Delegation, diffusion, institutional change, institutional design, regional international
organizations, regionalism
Introduction
In 2000, African heads of state strengthened the main framework for institutionalized
cooperation on the continent by replacing the Organization of African Unity with the
African Union. This transition marked a significant evolution towards more powerful
regional institutions, resembling those of the European Union (EU). The creation of a
Commission with a codified right to initiate legislation and to bring infringement cases
to a new African Court of Justice or Pan-African Parliament led many observers to
comment on the apparent ‘organisational mirroring’ occurring between the two bodies
(Haastrup, 2013: 789).
This episode poses an important theoretical question: which factors drive processes of
institution building within regional international organizations (RIOs)? More specifi-
cally, what role does the EU play in them? Most theories of regionalism, and of interna-
tional cooperation more broadly, are ill-equipped to capture such ‘outside-in’ influences
because they locate the main drivers of institution building within each respective region.
They view institutions primarily as reflecting the processes and structures of a given
region, ones that operate from the ‘inside out’. Dominant functional theories of coop-
eration — such as neofunctionalism (Haas, 1961), (liberal) intergovernmentalism
(Moravcsik, 1998) and neoliberal institutionalism (Keohane, 1984; Koremenos et al.,
2001) — view RIOs primarily as a response to conflicts or problems of collective action
resulting from economic or security-related interdependence within a particular region.
As patterns of interdependence shift, organizations change their form.
Similarly, constructivist or transactionalist approaches emphasize the role of commu-
nication and collective identities (Adler and Barnett, 1998; Deutsch, 1957; Katzenstein,
2005). They posit that organizations develop in response to changing social processes
and structures. Taken together, these benchmark studies see factors endogenous to the
region as being the drivers of institution building. As a recent review of two key works
on the subject perceptively notes: ‘Neither volume tells us much about interregional
flows … or about emulation and learning, including the demonstration effects of one
type of regionalism on another’ (Acharya, 2007: 637). With their focus on intraregional
influences, most such studies treat, in sum, different RIOs as atomistic entities that
develop largely independently of each other.
We challenge this widespread assumption in the literature on regionalism by develop-
ing a diffusion account of EU influence on other RIOs, then subjecting it to the first sys-
tematic large-N analysis thereof. We build on a growing body of research in Comparative
To continue reading
Request your trial